The Hidden Classical Background of Pooh

From The Pooh Perplex:

I shall say nothing of Wart's theory that Pooh is an Orphic deity with seasonal-sacrificial-redemptive crop-growing characteristics–a clever idea, but one that is given a disproportionate weight in Wart's sense of the total meaning of the book. (p.7)

Pooh's nightmare of endless Heffalumps making straight for his honey supply and eating it all requires, I believe, no complicated analysis (and least of all a Freudian one!). It is the very image of proletarian revolution, of the workers arising in a concerted mass to seize the means of production from the jaded bourgeoisie. (p.25)

Piglet has doubted whether Pooh's Ode to him, which at first sight looks as pure and false as Pindar upon whose locker-room eulogies it is patently modeled, really has told the truth...False, you see, but not naïve, and not false in Pindar's sense of toadying to the fixed system of glory, either. (p.33)

 Milne's chief spokesman, Eeyore, is a veritable Thersites, a malcontent who would have put Marston to shame. (p.43)

For those unfamiliar with Frederick Crew's work in The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, the assembled critical essays are in jest.